Wireless network cloud (WNC) is a new architecture for building the next generation of mobile and cellular networks by utilizing software-defined-radios and cost-efficient signal processing in a cloud. See, for example, Y. Lin et al., “Wireless network cloud: Architecture and system requirements,” IBM Journal of Research and Development, January-February 2010, vol., 54, issue 1. Traditional cellular networks consist of fixed base-stations that employ custom-built hardware and software to process wireless signals, which then connect back to the Internet/PSTN network. With the exponential growth in volume of wireless data, the main drawback with traditional designs is the huge capital investment required in scaling the network, in installing/maintaining/upgrading base-stations and other custom-built wireless equipment as the wireless standards evolve over time. Alternatively, in a wireless network cloud architecture, the base-stations are replaced with much cheaper Remote Radio Heads (RRH) which simply convert wireless waveforms into digital signals, which are then processed in a back-end cloud infrastructure. By exploiting the highly cost efficient processing in a cloud, commodity-hardware and collaborative signal processing, a wireless network cloud architecture provides a cost effective way to build scalable next-generation cellular networks.
Wireless resources such as spectrum are valuable resources (for increasing capacity and data rates), but are limited due to the limited frequency bands allotted by the FCC for commercial use. In current networks, spectrum is bought by service providers with long-term contracts and there is no mechanism to share spectrum dynamically, due to a prohibitive overhead in reconfiguring thousands of base-stations (which individually process the wireless signals).
Thus, techniques for dynamically sharing wireless resources such as spectrum in a WNC would be desirable.